 Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back. I'm Meron Khalili. We are DM25, a radical political movement for Europe. And this is a new season of live discussions with our coordinating team featuring subversive ideas. You won't hear anywhere else every fortnight. And one moment, I've made exactly the same mistake where I'm hearing myself too much. There we go, fixed. I have to learn to stop doing that. Okay, energy prices, they are spiraling far beyond now what people can afford. Power companies have hiked the price of electricity, making a tough winter even harder for millions of families. And this is all going hand in hand with a broader cost of living crisis. Analysts say it will be getting worse before it will get better. Politicians are slowly starting to do something about it. In Britain, where one in 10 families are at risk of energy poverty, Liz Truss, a former employee of Shell, our new prime minister, just announced an energy price cap, i.e. she's doing nothing to tax the obscene sky-high profits of energy companies. And across Europe, there have been other measures, including those announced by the European Commission this week, but all of this may be too little, too late. Meanwhile, on the ground, we're starting to see civil unrest, campaigns to stop paying energy bills like don't pay UK and people organizing in the streets. How much of this situation is due to how our politicians have set up Europe's energy market? And how much to corporate greed? And how much to Putin? As our politicians keep reminding us that this is Putin's price hike. What other factors are at play and how can we get out of this mess? Our panel, including our own Yanis Varoufakis and our team of campaigners and experts will be weighing in. You out there, good to see you again. If you've got anything you want to say or anything you want to throw at us, thoughts, comments, questions, rents, concerns, please put them in the YouTube chat. This is live and we will put them to our panel. Let's kick off with Yanis. Go for it, Yanis. Thanks, man. Comments, if you really want an indication of what's the matter, besides the fact that prices are going up, there's a war in Ukraine, supply chains have been interrupted. Look at the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is a very good case in point because it is self-sufficient. More or less 50%, actually more than 50% of Britain's electricity needs are covered by wind power, wind energy. Wind mills going around and around and around and around, producing electricity at zero marginal cost, just the cost of maintaining the wind mills and nuclear, right? As for the gas reliance, which is around 35%, 35% of British electricity, UK electricity is produced using natural gas. All of it comes from the North Sea, more or less all of it, on average all of it. So in other words, the UK doesn't need Russian gas, doesn't need Texan LNG, doesn't need to import anything. And yet, you'll see that the new Thatcher look-alike, Prime Minister, please trust, is promising to do something to cap the cost of electricity. Now, why is the cost of electricity in the UK rising? As far as it is rising here in Greece, where we have almost no natural gas that we produce or Italy, for that matter, there isn't is Thatcher. Because Thatcher privatized the electricity system in the UK and introduced the idea that privatization is a good thing for the people, not for the oligarchs, but for the people. The idea being that the market knows better how to reduce costs than the state, state bureaucracies, state owned and run electricity grids and power stations are stuck high costs that are betting, looking after the workers more than looking after the customers, the electricity consumers, that was the line. And she privatization of the United Kingdom is crucial because the model of the United Kingdom was then extended to the rest of the European Union. That's why it's important to understand the two phases, the two steps in which it happened. The first step was to say, okay, what's your price now? But how much are you paying for your electricity? You pay 50 quid per, I don't know how many kilowatt hours. Okay, fine. We're going to cap it. We're not going to allow the price to go beyond what you're paying. And then we're going to privatize and we will allow competition to bring it down. If it brings it down, you gain consumer, right? If they don't succeed, they are still capped at 50. So you got nothing to lose, you only have things to gain. That was a very powerful argument. If you add to that the fact that they were giving away shares to the people who then of course sold them to the oligarchs, that it was impossible to stop privatization of gas initially and then electricity. Second phase was to say, but who am I as a politician to be deciding what a cap of the prices, the maximum price? Why should politicians decide? I'll let the market do it. So that's phase two, the more toxic phase of privatization, which is responsible for the fact that we are going to have now, we are having bouts of energy poverty and more general poverty in Europe. The second phase was to say this, instead of having ministers or bureaucrats deciding the maximum price, what you're going to do is we're going to simulate a market. We can't have a market when it comes to electricity. We need to simulate to pretend we have a market. Why can't we have a market when it comes to electricity? Well, the only way we would have a market of electricity is imagine if there were 30, 50 different cables, electrical cables coming into your home and you could choose which one you're going to take your electricity from. Then there would be a market. Then it would be some kind of competition between different providers. But of course it would be stupid to have 50 grids going through every house and every street in every country. So there's one. There's one. So they simulate the market and how do they do that? They say, okay, we're going to split. That's the such a right model which prevails today in Europe. That's why I'm sticking to the UK example as a good example of what's going on. So they say, okay, we're going to split electricity, the electricity company that used to be the state owned electricity company. We're going to split it in at least three parts. First will be power generation. So each power plant, you have a coal fired power station. You have a natural gas power station. You have a bunch of solar panels, some windmills, you have a nuclear power station. Each one of them becomes a company or is owned by some company that may own more than one. And these companies compete with one another in the wholesale market. So they compete to provide the system with a wholesale price. Okay, that's one part. The second part is the network, the grid. That belongs to another company. And then there is the part where electricity leaves the grid to go into your home. And that's where you create 10, five, eight, 20 providers, electricity providers who compete with one another in the market of buying the electricity from the grid, which has bought it from the producers and then selling it to us, consumers, firms and households, competing with one another. So you create, you simulate competition between the producers. They produce the wholesale price through this competition. And then you have the providers who are competing with one another. The idea there is to allow competition to shrink the distance between the wholesale price and the retail price. That was phase two privatization. And this is what is now prevailing in Europe, in the European Union. They copied the copyright phase two model. Now, when you simulate a market, because it's not a real market, it's a pretend market. It's a market that you're pretending is there when it's not. You need to have certain government imposed rules, simply because you don't have a real market. You have a government pretending, simulating a market. So the EU has forced governments, has agreed their intergovernmental decisions, effectively France and Germany agreeing it amongst themselves and then imposing it on the rest of the European Union. And let me give you an example of what these rules are. So every day today is Thursday, 8th of September. Today there was an auction in the Netherlands. Well, it's based on, it's done digitally. So it doesn't, it's not physically. I mean, the servers where the auction takes place are in the Netherlands. So the providers, so the other providers, the producers, supposedly bid amongst themselves about who's going to provide the system. But the interesting thing is that it's exactly the opposite of what common sense would tell you should happen. When it comes to a proper auction and you've got people selling stuff, you would expect that the company or the person offering the lowest price wins, right? New, in this market, the company offering the highest price wins. And then the price is the same for everybody. As long as the sum of the electricity that they have provided is no more than a certain amount, which is what the market demands. It's madness, okay? It's called marginal cost pricing. And then supposedly the providers compete with one another to reduce the retail price to that maximum marginal wholesale price. Now, if this sounds complicated, it is because it was intended to be complicated. So the citizens of Europe do not understand that this is a scam against them, even during the good times. Prove of that is that the since privatization, the difference between the cost of producing an average kilowatt hour and the retail price has tripled. So don't believe anyone who tells you that the problem has not to do with the system. The problem is that the cost of production is going up. Yes, the cost of production is going up because the price of natural gas is going up, right? Because the price of this, that and the other is going up, but that does not explain, the war in Ukraine does not explain why the profit margins of the firms is getting larger. Are we clear on this? Okay. Yesterday I spoke in the Greek parliament and I exposed a scam of the Greek government, a particularly audacious scam of the Greek government. Under pressure from, I would even say a Mera25 dims, electoral wing in Greece. The government made a move months after the pressure came from us. And what was the pressure? Let me be clear. Back in March, 15th of March it was, we presented in parliament a proposal on how to shield consumers from skyrocketing prices. What we said was this. It is crazy that because the price of electricity produced from natural gas is skyrocketing because the price of natural gas skyrocketing, it's crazy, crazy mad that electricity coming out of solar panels, which costs nothing to produce. Once you have the solar panel, it is free. It's got a zero marginal cost. That the company, the private company that is selling solar produced kilowatt hours should get for that kilowatt hour, the same price that it will get had it produced it from the most expensive natural gas. It is mad, right? And you don't need to compensate to subsidize electricity prices. All you need to do is to eliminate these super profits by those idiots. Idiots, they're not idiots, they're very smart. We are the idiots. Okay? So we proposed something really very simple. That every kilowatt hour, the price of it should be set by the state equal to its average cost plus 5%. We're saying, okay, nobody should lose money. Even those capitalist entrepreneurs were profiting. Let's not, okay, don't lose money. What is your cost of producing a kilowatt hour or a megawatt hour from hydro? It's 80 euros. Okay, 80 euros plus let's say four euros of a 5% profit, 84. What is it from solar? Is it 50? Okay, 50 plus three of a profit. If you're producing from natural gas, it's very expensive, it's 400 euros because the price of natural gas is skyrocketed. Okay, 400 plus 5%. If you do this and you sum up over all sources of power, of electrical power, we would have had back in March a reduction in the average price of electricity of more than 50%, more than 50%, without any subsidization, without the state borrowing money, without taxing people, without anything. All that would happen is the super profits of the firms with the lowest level of marginal cost would be eliminated by a price. Okay? Comrades, between you and I, sometime in the middle of August, I was a little bit worried because the Greek government, it turned out, on the 6th of July, had legislated something that seemed very much like what we were proposing. I was a bit worried, I thought, oh my God, do I have now to come out and thank the government for doing the right thing? Because I read the law, 6th of July, published piece of legislation, okay? It was actually not a law, it was a ministerial decree. Fine. And it said exactly that. Lower price, they introduced a maximum cap, a cap for electricity produced by hydro, low, solar, a little bit higher, same with wind power, okay? And then for lignite and for natural gas, they had a formula, an arithmetic mathematical formula, which effectively gave that formula the average cost of producing through lignite or through natural gas, plus a small percentage. It was perfect. I thought, oh my God, our proposal has gone through. It's been legislated. I was getting ready to stand in parliament and thank the government for doing the right thing until I discovered that it's a complete and utter fraud. Because, and this is the beauty of it. Now, why am I talking about Greece? Why do the rest of you care? I'll tell you what you care and then I will explain the fraud. Because yesterday Ursula von der Leyen came out and announced that the Greek government's scam will be Europeanized. So, you know, comrades in Germany and France and Portugal in Spain expect the same scam to becoming your way immediately. Well, once they get their act together and they agree on it, because, you know, what the commission says and Ursula says, nobody cares. But the European Union Council may be deciding to agree with what von der Leyen said yesterday, which is a copy of what the Greek government is doing. Now, listen to what the Greek government is doing. The key, I mean, how did I understand that is a scam? Because they don't tell you, you know, footnote 3.8, this is where the scam is. You've got to do some detective work. You have to decipher it yourself. So, I'll tell you how the first inkling we had at Mera25, the team that we are pouring over all these regulations, the first inkling we had that this is a scam is when it mentioned that the auction, the daily auction for the wholesale price continues. This, you know, stock exchange in which wholesale producers are competing with one another in an auction continue. Now, the human mind cannot wrap itself around that. If you have a maximum price that is imposed by government on every different power station, why do you need the auction? Isn't that the obvious question to ask? Okay, now here it is, this is what they do. Okay, remember, the price for every megawatt hour that the government imposed from hydro works was 85 euros, okay? I looked at what the auction yielded, the price. It was 700 during this period, 700. The price cap was meant to be for those kilowatt hours produced by hydro works, it was meant to be 85, okay? Or 112 for some other ones. Takes the 112, which is a bit higher. So this is hard work. The producer of that kilowatt hour, or megawatt hour, receives the 700 euros that has been determined by the auction in the Netherlands, right? But then they have to give back to the Greek state the difference between the 700 and the price cap of 112, which is 558, right? Or 88, 588. So they give it back to the government. Okay, so far you think it's stupid. I mean, why do this? Why don't you just ask them to receive 112 instead of receiving 700 and then have to return the 558? So far no scum, just stupidity, just beautiful. Well, here's where the scum comes. The government does not take this money in order to give it to consumers. New. The government takes this money to give it to the retail companies. Now, if you look at every market almost in Europe, the same shareholder that owns the producer owns the retail company. Ah, caught you. So it is as if I have a company that is producing electricity and I have a company that is a retail company. So the government, what it does is they let the pseudo auction determine the price of 700, okay? They force me to return to the state from my left pocket, which is my pocket as a producer, 588 euros to the government. And the government puts it in my right pocket. Now, is it any wonder that a consumer feels no relief? Now, none, zero, zilch. Then what the government does is, okay, to help you, dear consumer, I'm going to borrow money, the government will borrow money, add it to the government budget to subsidize your electricity bill. In other words, to allow you to give the oligarch the money in my pocket that the government has taken from one pocket and put it in another pocket. Now, if this is not a scam, I do not know what the word scam means. This is the definition of a scam. This is happening in Greece, it's been happening since 6th of July. And now this is a proposal by the European Commission in all its glory and greatness for how we're going to deal with. Now, why are they doing this? Because complexity is in the interest of the oligarchy. I just took 23 minutes to explain this to you. Now, no media are going to give me 23 minutes in Greece to explain this to the people out there. Nobody's going to allow the people of France, the people of Portugal, the people of Slovakia, the people of Cyprus, 23 minutes in order to have somebody explain this to them. You get 20 seconds to the three seconds and then you are interrupted. And in the meantime, nobody can understand what's going on. People think, okay, so they are imposing a price cap, they are subsidizing the public, so the government is doing something. No, the government is doing nothing. The government are agents of the oligarchy, they are crooks and they are thieves. And this is a clear cut case of destroying the capacity of the majority of Europeans to make ends meet in the interest of an oligarchy, combining two things. On the one hand, the market fundamentalism of thatcher that creates the simulated market, which has failed us, especially now that energy prices are up, with statism, the state borrowing, increasing public debt, so that the state can subsidize the oligarchs, but not the consumers. The only solution to this is the immediate abandonment of the market model, the closure of the auction house in the Netherlands, the first step before you do anything else, we need to have a proper price cap, both at the wholesale level and at the retail level, so that the price that people pay reflects average cost plus a small percentage, a little bit of profit for whoever is running the show. That's number one, that should be DM25 policy across Europe and market fundamentalism and the delusion of markets, blow up markets. There can be no market when it comes to electricity because there's only one electricity cable coming out of your wall, and there can be no market when they try to simulate the market with one cable coming out of the wall, they are scamming society. So that's point number one, point number two, we need an energy union, a green energy union. We can no longer sustain this fallacy of the market which allows the German government to have its own plans about the green transition, the green government, its own plans, nobody's investing in green hydrogen properly, nobody's investing in solar panels and windmills that are actually owned by communities, they are doing everything for the oligarchs. So the second plank of the DM25 policy I think should be one of a socialized green energy union incorporating within the system, this network of green energy production and distribution with ownership rights at the municipal level, the regional level, socialized, overseen by citizen assemblies, by juries of randomly selected citizens and so on and so forth. And the third thing that we must do, and I know that that sounds controversial, but it would be my proposal, and sanctions on Russian energy. The only people who benefit from the sanctions on Russian gas and oil are the Russian oligarchs and the European oligarchs. It is not helping Ukraine, it is not undermining Putin, it is enriching Putin and his oligarchs, it is enriching our own people, majorities and the sanctions that are only in the interest of the United oligarchies of Russia, of Ukraine, of Germany, of Italy and of Greece. Thank you. Thank you very much for that, Janice, very detailed description, a lot to unpack and digest there. Johannes, Johannes Ferre from Berlin. Thanks, Mehran, and thanks for the perfect overview that we all just heard. I have nothing to add there. I just wanted to speak a little bit of what's actually happening in Germany on the topic, yeah, which is kind of a different version what Janice was just describing in Greece. Also here, of course, gas prices, especially are rising because we have been, yeah, hugely dependent on Russian gas in Germany, 70% of our gas was coming from Russia in the past, which was, of course, a big mistake to be so dependent on one source of your energy by Merkel's government over the last years. Now the prices reach record levels, also on the electricity exchange, the energy companies are making huge profits, their speculation, everything that Janice already described, and the government now came out with something that they call a massive relief package. It's saying something about the cap on electricity prices, but there's no plan yet on how to implement it, so this will probably take a long time, if ever realized. On the cap of energy of gas prices, they I think wanted to say something, so without actually doing something, so they announced a commission that should look into if a gas cap is possible. And what the government actually has done already some time ago has introduced is an additional gas fee because they wanna bail out companies and they don't wanna use their budget because Germany has a debt break, especially our liberal finance minister, is once at all costs to keep that, so apparently there's no money from the government to bail out the gas companies that are about to go bust. So the government continues with this gas fee that every consumer should pay to get some money so the companies that were profiting from the cheap gas from Russia don't go bust now in this new situation where they have to pay much higher prices to buy gas from other sources and they want to finance that by all consumers paying an even higher gas price on actually already high prices. So all of that is yeah, it's quite crazy. I think this somehow has to change sooner or later because I think people will just not take it. I think we also have started to go onto the streets to protest this and our proposal would of course be if you have to bail out companies and I think you should use the opportunity to actually put them in public hands. If you have to bail out the company you can use this opportunity to put them in public hands and that is something that Meta25 in Germany is proposing, our lecture wing here is proposing for all the energy market to put it in public hands and let this work to a reasonable price not in the private market to put energy to the people because it's and the companies and the economy because it's just one of the most basic and most important things. Yeah, I think the German government also is kind of, I've seen our chancellor in the parliament addressing the conservatives who are now in opposition and telling them that they have failed to, they have put us in this situation, a government that he himself was part of as a finance minister and there was big news about it. A lot of people applauded that now he's fiery and actually giving it to the opposition that has made all this mess. It just shows that we have a very, very big center of parliament and not even our very weak and very divided left opposition in the parliament is speaking about putting energy companies into public hands. Also their proposals are actually quite small and them as well being divided. So I think all of that says just that there is a massive change in politics needed and that's what we're working on. Thanks. Thanks, Johannes. A couple of comments from the chat here. Alex says people running a scam like that should be in prison. Someone else adds, oh, Keelik 69 adds, you know this is going to happen with water too at some point in the future. And Xavier has a question. He says, I have big respect for all of you but what can we do about it? So we will be talking about that a bit later. Xavier, including some of the grassroots actions to push back against what's happening here. Juliana, Juliana Zita, also from Germany. Love yours. Thank you, Mecham. Yeah, what we can do, I think it's the crisis is overall split into parts kind of also special with the energy because you have the present crisis with costs of living and affordable energy and then you have the other problem which is the accelerating climate crisis, you know. And there are people who are very clear on this topic. You know, you have activists like Fridays for Future who see the solution in investing in renewable energy and setting up everything for the future. And then you have the people who are suffering from the crisis now who are not so convinced by these progressive ideas because they want to see themselves first secured which is something that I think everyone can understand why that is, you know. If you cannot pay your bills, you're interested in how does politics solve your problem right now. But what Yana said before with those 23 minutes and not having the time to explain to people what's wrong, I think this is where the problem for those, you know, at the moment smaller parties out there which are concerned with these topics have really a problem to get through a target group in these times because you have this split of problems, you know, and we also have a competition of problems mostly in the public domain but not so much a competition of ideas and solutions. So every time somebody tries to explain something explicit, you know, they get cut off on TV, for example. And, you know, all the narratives are always negative. Like everything is going to be, you know, to be more difficult every day and everyone is like always concentrated on how much more worse things can go. But we never talk about what has been done already, what can be done and maybe not even what we have missed to do because there are positive examples. I mean, I've looked into it like, for example, the community I live in, they made a plan over a decade ago and said they want to be 100% renewable and they reached their goal five years earlier even because they were able to build wind parks and so on. Their next goal is to have 75% reduced CO2 emission by next year and also the numbers look good. So you have cities and villages in Germany all over the place, like not too many but still they are there with good examples of how communities managed to be 100% renewable. You know, other thing is we have a whole bureaucratic monster that keeps people from investing in those things that keeps people from even looking into it because for example, if you put solar panels in Germany you have a small business from that point on and you have everything that comes with the small business. That's not attractive to invest in these things. So there is no real, you can't see with the government, for example, that they're interested in putting money or energy or thought into renewable energies. Instead, we're going back to letting the power plants run longer, for example. There is a whole conservative campaign over we have to hold on to fossil fuel. We have to hold on to these things because prosperity will vanish if we do, if we try something new if we're going for renewable energies. And I think to balance that out and to be straightforward about renewable energy and about a change of the market and also all the great ideas that Yanis proposed must for us always be paired with the thinking of how to relieve people now also which is also part of the price cap and so on. And I think this is something that all the parties in Germany miss, the established parties of course but also the very niche parties that are only renewable energy or only this or only that. And we need really a holistic view of this crisis and to really say, okay, you are not in either one of those groups. You're not somebody that lives in prosperity and you're just fear for the future or you're someone that cannot pay their bills now and you don't care about the earth in the future. You have common interests and we have common solutions that can help everyone. And I think to get through with this message and to really explain to people the scams at the problems is something that we as a movement, but also it's people out there who maybe understand a few things better than somebody else. And just be open-minded to really come to a common reality with each other. I think this is a big goal for us to be able to shift perspective and to see the world through the other person's eyes much more than ever in these days to find good solutions for everyone. Juliana, can I ask you something? I mean, the long-term solutions that we're putting forward here, they involve more state intervention in these markets. Is there really an appetite? I mean, I'm just playing the devil's advocate here, but I'm given that we're always hearing that trust in the state has never been so low and governments have screwed up and failed to protect us and so on. Is there really an appetite for that? Are people ready to trust the state with some more with something as fundamental as their energy needs? No, I don't think so because, but it's because of the current political landscape. I think if a figure would show up that was that convincing and pragmatic about stuff, I think people would be open to it. But of course, if you look at your government and you have Lindner sitting there who is like a mentally 12-year-old cocky, neo-liberal who is really like, he hates poor people. I mean, evidently in everything that he says. And of course, people don't say, I want to give more of important things to these people, but I think we have to dream also of a different political landscape when we have these ideas because without it, they are nothing worse, of course. Thank you, Juliana Dushan. Dushan Payavich, our campaign coordinator from Montenegro, Dushan. Thanks, Macron. My colleagues said a lot of things. I will just try to add some stuff and to simplify our message a bit, but also before I go into that, let me maybe refer to the previously asked question. There is a big difference if you ask me between state-owned and publicly-owned companies. I think we advocate and we should advocate for publicly-owned companies, which means dividends back to the society and the people who are living with it. Not the money goes to the pockets of career politicians and similar stuff. This is my take on it. And regarding the whole story about the energy crisis, my take is to put it bluntly and simply that the prices are not rising out of nowhere and that the energy crisis is completely fabricated. There is no crisis for the oligarchs. If you are wondering why your bills are so high, you should know that oil and gas companies got more than 820 billion in profits just in 2022. In profits. That means quote-unquote clean money. So this is not some kind of a natural disaster. The market is also not something that is external. People who are literally stealing your money have their names and addresses. And this refers to the point on what should we do? Join us and appear in front of their doors and the doors of their corporations to demand democratization of energy. We need to bring down the oligarchy and we will do it on the streets. We are going to do it in the parliaments. We are already doing it through Mera Greece. I was just looking at the video where Yanis calls by name the oligarchs in Greece. Also, I strongly assume and hope and think that our comrades in Germany are going to do that, do the same for their own country in a couple of months. And bottom line, the oligarchy needs to return the energy system to the hands of the people and not the small group of the so-called elites. Energy should be democratized and furthermore, we need to build solar panels and windmills and invest in green hydrogen and just forget altogether about these bastards. I don't have a more simple word for that when it comes to this. Ultimately, I don't mean forgetting about them in every sense because they'll need to pay their fair share of taxes and even answer to the law if they did something illegal, which I strongly assume they did with the scamming like this and with so much damage that they are doing to the people, to the planet and to the non-human animals. But this needs to end right now and dm25.org slash join us. Thank you, Dushan, you make a very good point there that the, I mean, with a scam of these proportions, the gloves really need to come off. And I think that's exactly what we're seeing. There's a new campaign, well, about a month old now that is on everybody's lips in the UK, don't pay UK, that is gathering together people to refuse to pay their energy bills on October the 1st. And the last time I looked, they had almost 200,000 people who've pledged to do it. If they get a million people to pledge to do it, then they will do it. And if they don't get a million, they won't. So people won't feel alone doing it and it can really impact the energy companies. And I think this is the kind of thing that we're seeing across Europe in other countries too. So interesting times. Thanks for that. Eric Edmund, our political director. Thank you, Dushan. The thing I wanted to talk about a bit is, if you think about the political narrative and the media take right now, people in Europe are being asked to suffer in solidarity with Ukraine, to pay astronomical bills, to go combed Belgium, where I'm living, 40% of the population of Belgium are fairly well off country in Western Europe, will be on the border line of poverty this winter as a result of the energy prices. 40%, almost half the population. When we were talking about the climate crisis, not once was there the political will to talk about the suffering that would be required. We had to make that argument on the basis that nothing would change, that everything would be fine, that we could do it and create millions and billions of jobs, and it would only be positive, positive, positive, in order to save the planet and ourselves with it. Well, primarily ourselves, the planet eventually will bounce back, we're not looking so good. And now with Ukraine, we're bending over backwards. And as well we should, as well we should, if it meant the end of the war, if it meant true solidarity with the people of Ukraine, if it meant truly handicapping the oligarchs that are financing the war, if it meant putting a stop to the machinery of President Putin's war machinery in Russia, but none of that is the case. None of that is the case. We couldn't say it for the environment and the planet, and we can say it in this case. And really what it comes down to is that we're not doing it for Ukraine, we're not doing it to hurt Putin. If you look at the true crisis in Europe, it's the fact that our society has given up, as you said, Metva, we've given up on the state, we've given up on politics, by and large a huge part of society has given up on politics. And as a result, politics has given up on us. Politicians don't serve us. They serve huge political and economic and geopolitical interests. And you see that again and again, it's so obvious people don't even blink anymore. Trusts in the UK, the new prime minister of the United Kingdom is gonna reintroduce fracking in 2022 as a result of this crisis. She is putting in the position of, for supervising the green transition and that entire portfolio, re-smoke with a climate change tonight. Yannis spoke about how European oligarchs and Russian oligarchs are profiting. American oligarchs, the United States in general has played Europe for fools this past year. They are running, they're laughing all the way to the bank. Their NATO, their geopolitical trojan of force has found a reason to exist. Their military industrial complex is pumping out weapons and cashing in, like not since the Iraq war and their liquid natural gas exports are through the roof. We have a situation where the biggest for geopolitical and economic players are benefiting from the status quo, both in Europe and the United States and in Russia. So we're stuck with the situation because it doesn't serve us, the people, it serves those big interests and this at the brink of climate collapse. So the situation here really and the big takeaway that from now on, we cannot be going back to the same people for change. I know people who have watched these live streams people are tired of me saying this, but we cannot go to the same political parties to the same politicians and look at the media. They talk about gaffes as if it's a mistake, as if it's a slip up, as if it's a, this is all by design. It's not a crazy conspiracy theory. It's all about what political interests are being served, economic interests being served and it's not the people. So we cannot turn to those same people for change, we cannot turn to those same people for solutions, we need to create those solutions ourselves. We have some as the M25 now, speaking from our perspective and what we're doing, we have our campaigns, we have grassroots initiatives that we have developed in the past, we will develop in the future that try and help people day in, day out, at the municipal level, at the local level, at the regional level, we have political parties that we're developing in order to give people a new chance to believe that change is possible because they're not speaking to the same people, they're not talking to the divinely ordained politicians who no matter what election, no matter what year, always return either to government or to a position and continue exactly the same game under exactly the same rules. We need a break in this vicious circle. We've seen it with climate change, we're seeing it with this war, it's exactly the same thing. And we need to keep at it and not lose sight of that target, that you need a systemic change that goes right to the people in power. Thanks, Eric, and a rather disturbing statistic to follow up on your point about the connections between governments and the energy sector. This is from the International Energy Agency earlier this year. 51 governments around the world, including the US, Germany, Canada, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia provided a combined $697.2 billion in tax breaks and other handouts to the fossil fuel industry last year up from $362.4 billion in 2020. Their business models are failing and the governments are bailing them out with your money. Let's hand it now to Daphne Dalcara, our new CC member based in France and then we'll give the floor back to Yenis, Daphne. Hello, hello, everybody. Nice to be here, thrilled, bit bewildered. Yeah, I mean, I'm just recovering from like the attacking hardware that Yenis is explanation has caused and the blood pressure rise. But I think it's really comes back a bit also to what Eric is saying, it's like so much also about access, I think, like the unlimited manpower and access the these corporations have that where like Friday's award future and other grassroots movements fail to see that like asking them, we can never match. I don't think we can ever match that intensity and know how and resources. And as if like, oh, if we just said the things enough times, these politicians will somehow like be disengaged from this perpetual access they've been so accustomed to. And I think also like, it's not always like the politicians that are like sold and like integrated into the oligarchy which they exist obviously. But I mean, I think that they like gone through such a ridiculous scam like so many deep notes to hide the scam shows that like, they're also counting on some MPs and some MPs to not notice it is a scam, right? And to pass it through because it has the right technocratic language or whatever. So yeah, I guess it's not enough to just say things to the politicians, but also like try to take power where we can. And another thing I want to add is that yeah, I mean, I think water municipalization has been somewhat of a success. It's like, I don't want to call the growing movement because it's not as coherent, but around the world in the past like 10 years more and more people are municipalizing their water supply. And there's been very successful campaigns. One of the very first ones were here was here in Grenoble. So yeah, I would like to hope the same for electricity. Of course, that needs more infrastructure and new like more capital I guess. So to make some wind farm or whatever. So I guess that would be great if we could have some schemes that facilitate that. But yeah, yes, that's all for me. Thank you, definitely. I hand it over to Yanis. Yanis. I just wanted to add a little bit yet. Johannes mentioned the panicky attempt by the German government, but also by other governments and also by the European Union, von der Leyen mentioned it yesterday in the small print. They're panicking because the companies that are making huge quantities of money, the electricity companies out of this crisis are going bankrupt. Did you get that? They are profiting massively and they're going bankrupt. How is this possible? Let me tell you how it's possible. Because they're all financialized and they're part and parcel of effectively what was happening in Wall Street for decades. Electricity companies do the following. For years now they've been doing it. They've been hedging. In other words, in order to ensure that if the price of electricity goes down, that they won't lose money, that's before the price of electricity went through the roof. In order to ensure that if the price comes down, they won't lose money, they have been investing, purchasing, insurance contracts from financial companies. The equivalent, if anybody knows or remembers through the debt crisis of the CTSs, if you don't remember, it doesn't matter. Ignore what I just said. So they buy insurance. The insurance is a contract for two, three, four years. So effectively what they do is this. They buy an insurance contract that if the price comes down, will give them money. So they will make less money because the prices come down, but they will take money from the insurance company or from the financier that is selling them this insurance company, okay? So that was what they were doing up until now. Now a lot of those companies like Uniper, for instance, in Germany, but also here in Greece, in Germany, in France, everywhere, in Italy, yeah, they are locked into these insurance contracts. Now remember once more, I know it is complicated, but remember once more, these contracts, when the price goes down, they cost more to service to pay every month your insurance premium and opposite. When the price of electricity goes up, you have to keep paying a lot more in order to service this contract. So this is what is happening because they insure themselves against falling prices, okay? With contracts that will give them money if prices are coming down. Now prices are coming up. They have to pay a lot more to the insurance companies. And because they never had the money to pay the insurance companies, do you know how they pay for these insurance contracts? Through issuing bonds, you know what this means? Debt. So these companies like Uniper, now have to borrow huge amounts of money in order to pay their insurers. But nobody is lending them because nobody trusts them. So what von der Leyen actually said yesterday, she called upon Europeans, and this is Johan as the point. When they're asking for customers, for citizens to subsidize the companies, they're asking customers to pay the insurance fees for these companies that have insured themselves against falling prices in an environment in which prices are rising. So to put it in the language of Wall Street, they have shorted their own price. And they are now asking for the citizens to pay for it. That's crime number two, which I'm adding to the charge sheet, crime number one from before. Enough. Thank you, Yanis. Yeah, and this impenetrable language and complexity is the means by which they get away with it, as has been said earlier on. I can't understand any of this. Yeah, I mean, I'm still definitely had tachycardia and I need to lie down after all of that, but I'm sure once I've replayed everything that's been said here on half speed, I'll get it and I'll get it mad. And if you guys out there are also getting mad listening to what you're hearing, then please know that we are a campaigning movement. We're running for elections and we're planning grassroots activities for people who don't want to be part of the political process and we're facilitating and mobilizing and training. And we're not just talking about these things, we're trying to confront and act. So please join us. Dushan already gave you the address, but for those that didn't get it, the address is dm25.org slash join. Thank you out there. I know there are more questions coming. We don't have time now to answer them all, but thank you out there for listening and please join us again at the same time, same place two weeks from now.